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Personal Demons

If there’s one horror movie series that personifies what we do on this site, it’s Demons 1 and 2.

You’ll notice our podcast graphic is a reproduction of Bobby Rhodes and company emerging from the stairs, but put on in theater as a tribute to Siskel and Ebert (there’s three people for visual symmetry, even though there’s only two of us who host the show).

That said, we have a third member of our team who drops by on occasion, a kind of session man adding axe-work to our usual riffing.

He’s Scott Drebit over at Daily Dead. He holds the Demons films in as high esteem as we do. As he puts it in his excellent column Drive-In Dust Offs, the film abjures Romero’s social subtext in favor of what he calls, “maximum carnage, vibrantly displayed.”

Pace Signor Lamberto Bava, we acknowledge that Demons are NOT zombies, it was just a comparison m’kay?!

Both Demons are so stupid they transcend the stupid. Goethe might’ve said there’s nothing worse than aggressive stupidity, but in the case of this series, there’s damn-near nothing better.

It’s one of the few films that produce revulsion, laughter and applause. The first one is basically a metal video with eye gougings; it’s a kinetic assault on the senses, virtually plot-less, chaotic and intense.

It is the quintessential Really Awful Movies movie, as it’s by no means high art, yet it does what it does exceedingly well. It’s a rare breed, the horror that perfectly produces unintentional laughs and bloody thrills. More often than not the latter suffers at the expense of the former.

The movie’s been front and center on this site, appearing as a brand banner which eventually replaced Really Awful Movies favorite, the Man in the Pan from Re-Animator (a film that produces pound for pound, more intentional laughs and bloody thrills than any other). It inspired this website’s merchandise too…